Media content, such as television, film or radio often contain particular content that may be considered by some to be offensive. Although video and/or audio content may be provided with a suitable age rating this is not always sufficient to prevent offense. For example, certain language, whilst deemed suitable for a particular age range by a regulatory body, may not be considered suitable by a parent.
Often parents would allow their children to experience certain media content, such as films or television programmes, if any offensive language were filtered out.
Systems are known for performing word recognition on an audio stream, and altering the audio stream to remove undesired language. However, such systems are either not capable of doing so “on the fly” in real time, or would require large amounts of processing power to do so. This makes known systems expensive and not particularly suitable for media content that the user would generally like to experience without having to wait, such as media content provided by broadcast.